Who Goes First?

Going first in a game usually affords an advantage to that player, though it is not substantial and most likely normalizes over the course of the game. But still, an advantage is an advantage and most games recommend that for the sake of fairness the players roll a die and the highest roller will kick things off. This is fine, and usually the preferred method in the games I play in. However, some games do recommend alternate methods of deciding the first player. Here are some of my favorites, with suggestions to improve them as well.

It makes sense that the starting player of Pandemic is connected to illness, that is after all what the game is about. In this cooperative game the rules state that the player who has been sick most recently goes first. I like this one a lot and in our games we always stick to it. The reason why? It’s always different every time that you play, essentially making it random. I don’t think that this one needs fixing.

One of the stranger methods of choosing a starting player is employed by Smallworld. The player with the pointiest ears gets to go first. Certainly an odd way of picking things, I do like that it rewards such a bizarre personal trait that really may have never come up before in the person’s life. However, like a lot of these methods it winds up being redundant in a group of players that frequently game together. Unless someone is so committed to victory in Smallworld that they alter their ears the same person will continue to go first. Here is my suggestion for an alternate method. Once the initial races are all out on the table the player who most resembles the race in the first spot goes first. Sure, it could cause some hard feelings when trying to figure out who among you most resembles an orc or a ghoul, but really it’s just setting the tone for a game that is all about slaughtering your friends. And if an elf pops up you can still fall back on the pointy ears.

Ticket to Ride rewards the most well traveled of a group of gamers. The initial player is determined by the player who has visited the most places. Like Smallworld this gets old fast, though it does at least have the possibility of changing if you have a long term gaming group. People travel, usually for the reason of improving their chances of going first in Ticket to Ride. Not really, but this game is not really about traveling. It’s about trains. How about the first player is the one who has most recently been on a train? Done.

It’s fun to pick on old people, and clearly the designers of Bohnanza agree with me. In everyone’s favorite game about bean farming, the first player is the player to the left of the dealer. Which is pretty standard fare, however the rules state that the dealer is the oldest player. Ouch. Not only does the elder gamer have to do all of the setup, but then they ultimately wind up going last as well. Not sure what any of that has to do with beans or farming and it also suffers from the redundancy problem, though in a different way (the first player is always changing, but the last player stays the same). My fix is rather simple. Prior to shuffling all the players flip over a single card, the player with the most common bean then has to do all of the shuffling and be the last player. Come on, growing old sucks as it is. Does Bohnanza really need to be against you too?

For a game that is all about being an evil overlord it seems like an odd choice that Dungeon Lords chose to reward the nicest player by having them go first. But I think it is a brilliant way of deciding. There is nothing quite like watching several people argue over who is the nicest among them. It is also the type of thing that is subject to rapid changes based on recent actions. I think that this method is pretty solid, and since in Dungeon Lords players are not really getting a chance to actually kill one another it’s nice to be able to get some animosity out with a healthy argument to start the game.

There is nothing wrong with the random roll of the dice to determine who has the minor advantage of going first, but sometimes a game deserves a little better. Plus, these games all have one thing in common. They don’t use any dice so something else needed to be implemented. (The exception is Smallworld which has the reinforcement die, but it is not a traditional die and could result in a bunch of ties. So we will forget about that one.) I applaud the game designers for coming up with a solution that has some personality to it, even if they are a bit redundant at times.

Bohnanza Revisited

Recently our gaming group has played a couple of games of Bohnanza, everyone’s favorite bean farming game. However, I’ve had to reconsider some of my thoughts on the game because two aspects of it. One, we actually have not been playing the game the correct way. Two, Bohnanza is an excellent two player game.

So, apparently we’ve been playing Bohnanza all wrong the entire time. I feel foolish about it, especially since I’m usually the one who reads the rules and figures out how games work. While playing the other night Cris pointed out that she thought we were doing a couple of things wrong. Turns out she was right. Apparently she learned something about farming this summer. Somehow I manage to totally misinterpret two pretty important rules and created a new version of the game, one that breaks from the actual game in a couple of key aspects. In a strange twist the rules that we’ve been playing with are like a Bizarro version, here’s what we’ve been doing. The first mistake was allowing a player to dig up any bean field when they had to plant and had no open spaces, rather than the actual rule of harvesting the bean field that is the largest. Pretty big difference? It is, though the other one is even more significant, I think. During the donation and auction phase of the turn a player can turn down a donation from another player, we had been playing that you must take any cards that the other player gives to you. Which was often a very destructive way to play the game, essentially because your opponent was giving you cards that you had to play. If we had only done one of these wrong I don’t think the game would have worked and we would have been left scratching our heads (and probably figured out how it actually works), but with both mistakes they sort of cancelled each other out. Here is the difference; in the correct version a player has a great deal of control over what they plant in their fields, however when forced to plant they can’t control what gets dug up. In our renegade version a player was often forced into planting cards that they did not want, however they had total control over what was harvested. In the end our game worked fine, but I do think that the actual rules are the better ones.

I’m not sure why I read the rules this way, they are pretty clear. Not having to accept donations is even printed in bold! So how did this happen? I have a theory. When we first got Bohnanza earlier this year and started playing it a bunch, we had just come out of a phase of playing a lot of Munchkin. Because of the cut-throat nature of Munchkin I think that we were in the mindset that the goal of games is to screw the other players and make their life miserable, therefore it made perfect sense that you would be sticking it to the other bean farmers by forcing wax beans into their plentiful fields of cocoa and black eyed. And considering how much we embraced this idea one thing is quite clear. We are rotten people who delight in making games harder for one another.

The more pleasant discovery involving Bohnanza is that it is a really great two player game. There are several key changes to the game from the normal version, but simple changes that are easy to adapt to. The biggest difference is that any cards left over during the auction phase do not have to be taken by the player or traded, any beans left stay on the board and the opposing player has the option of taking or discarding these beans at the beginning of their turn. The other interesting wrinkle is that the top card in the discard pile is added to the face up auction cards if they match. For example: a green bean is put face up during step three of the turn, the top card in the discard pile is also a green bean, so the discarded bean is placed on top of the other one creating a stack of two cards that can be taken by the player or traded. This creates a whole new strategy that involves selling off at key times and creating large piles on the board. I highly recommend the two player variant of Bohnanza. Twice Mike and I played last night (he won once, and we tied the other) and I suspect we will play again soon.

Bohnanza, the Bean Farming Game

For many of us the exciting and glamorous world of bean farming is an unattainable dream. But now, thanks to the card game Bohnanza, we can all experience what it is like to grow, harvest, and sell crops of beans! Thrilling, I know. Despite the mundane and odd nature of the subject matter, Bohnanza is actually a very fun game. It¹s simple to learn, but like all good games has enough strategy to make it worth playing. It also works great with larger amounts of players. The game is for 2-7 players and should take about forty five minutes to an hour for a game. The goal is to be the wealthiest farmer at the end of the game.

The game could not have simpler components. It is just a deck of bean cards. That¹s it. The cards are a bit too slick and thin for my liking, which makes them sort of hard to shuffle. They have a tendency to slip out of one¹s hands when mixing them up. Not a huge problem. There are many varieties of beans available to the ambitious farmer; red, chili, coffee, wax, really just about any bean you could think of. The art has a lot of personality, but it¹s not all that great. The beans are all portrayed in this anthropomorphic way that shows them embodying the characteristics of the bean. The coffee bean is totally amped up and hyper, while the wax bean is slipping on a shiny floor. The green bean? He¹s on the verge of vomiting, grasping a lamp post for support with a flask at his feet. The beans are all worth different amounts based on their scarcity. For example the relatively common blue bean is worth two gold for a group of six. However, the elusive cocoa bean brings in the tidy sum of three gold for three beans. The value of the beans also scales upward as the size of the harvest increases, which is a good incentive to hang onto a bean field rather than sell them the first chance that you get.



Players are each dealt five bean cards to start the game. The remaining cards form the draw deck. The rules state that the oldest player is responsible for shuffling all the cards, which I think is pretty funny. Each turn consists of several very easy steps. The active player must plant the first card in their hand into a bean field by placing it face up on the table. At the start of the game a player has two bean fields available to them for planting (at any time a third bean field can be purchased for three gold). Additionally the player may plant the next card in their hand, but they do not have to. Beans can also be planted onto the field of a similar bean, creating stacks that are worth more money. This is not a new bean field. The next phase of the turn is essentially an auction. The player draws two cards from the draw deck and places them face up on the table. They may do whatever they like with these cards; keep them, trade them to the other players for other beans, or donate them to another player. Any cards received by any player in this phase do not go into the players hand, but rather are placed to the side and must be planted in the next phase of the turn. Therefore any cards obtained in this manner must go right into a bean field. It’s a great way to screw up someone’s field by donating a card to them that they must plant. In the final phase of the turn the player draws three more cards and places them at the back of their hand. Next player goes.

Beans can be harvested and sold at any time, though a single bean is never worth anything. Only groups of beans gets the player any gold. The back of all the bean cards has a gold symbol which counts as one gold piece, when a field is harvested the appropriate number of cards are flipped over and go into the players bank, the remainders are placed into the discard pile. When the draw pile is exhausted all cards in the discard are reshuffled (by the oldest player!) and the draw starts over. Each time the pile gets smaller due to cards in play and cards that are now being used as gold. This happens three times and then the game ends. The player with the most gold can then hold their head up high, assured with the knowledge that they are a champion bean farmer.

One of the unique aspects of Bohnanza and what gives it, in my opinion, an interesting mechanic is the way that a player must manage their hand in order to be successful. Players are restricted in that they can only play their cards in the order that they are in their hand. Cards can¹t be rearranged, when a card is drawn it goes to the back of the hand and all cards are played in sequence. What it does is force the player to find ways to get to the cards that they want, often at the expense of helping another player by giving them a bean that they need (in the auction phase) in order to move up a bean in your hand. Makes sense? You may already have a field of green beans in play, plus two more green beans in the middle of your hand. Unfortunately there are several cards between you and those precious green beans. During the auction phase you may offer the cards that are next in the sequence to another player in order to bump up the green beans in your hand to the front of the line. Plant them and, if you like, sell them at the next opportunity.

Bohnanza is not a super intense strategy game that takes numerous plays to really grasp the concept and tactics. But rather it is a light hearted, fast and enjoyable game appropriate for any group. The bottom line is that it is a lot of fun, more so that a lot of other games that try much harder.